I appreciate this is a long post and any advice is welcomed!
So my ex and I were together for 3.5 years. She broke up with me last summer for a range of reasons.
I’ll give a bit of background, we met early 2022 when I moved to a new city for a job and we met up for drinks and got along so well. As we had only met once and I was new to a city with my own flat, I continued to ‘date’ other girls (I was very open about this to her). And she also ‘dated’ other guys at the same time. As her and I met up a few more times, we both said that we like each other and want to be exclusive. It was going so well but after a few weeks she just sent me a massive paragraph saying that she really likes me but doesn’t like my body count (mine was 10 and hers was 1 prior to us meeting). We messaged a bit more about it and then she called it quits but in a good way (like she said I do really like you and would hope to meet again one day but right now isn’t the best time). So in total, we spoke for 3 weeks ‘casually’ and 2 more weeks ‘exclusive’. After 2 months of not talking, it was her birthday so I wished her happy birthday and we started talking from there again. One of the first questions she asked me was if I slept with anyone else during this time to which I said yes, 1 girl. She didn’t seem that bothered by it at the time. Anyway, we continued dating exclusively and then got into a relationship for 3.5 years.
Now here comes the downside, during our relationship she would always think that I was cheating, she would always take my phone to read my messages and so on. This was all simply because of my body count. If someone on TV cheated she would say ‘that’s 100% you’ and I would just be like no and reassure her. I did so much reassurance over the years it was actually exhausting. Even during the relationship she would always ‘joke’ and say if we ever broke up I would go out and go wild and get with loads of girls straight away. She was 21 when we met and I was 25, and after her 25th birthday last year, I felt like she started acting different when it came to other guys. For example, she asked me to look at my ‘explore page’ on instagram to see if there was any girls on there and I agreed and she saw nothing, so I asked her to see her ‘explore page’ and it was filled with topless guys. She also spoke a lot more ‘sexually’ to me which was weird because for the first few years so hated speaking sexually as she would cringe and be shy. There are other things but overall I just had this gut feeling that she is different now. I felt like when I met her, she was super shy and innocent and was like that for years but the last 4/5 months of our relationship she was just different. Anyway, she broke up with me because she found a photo of a girl that I slept with from 2018. Yes, you’re reading that right, I had a photo on my phone of a girl from 2018 (4 years before we met), and she went mental. I was so confused. But she ended it and said ‘your body count is 11 and when I was 21 I thought that was normal for a 25 year old but now I’m 25, I don’t know anyone on that number so I think that you need to find a girl with a high body count’. I was shocked, like did this girl even love me?! She’s breaking up with me because she’s got older basically. Like how does that even make sense, she knew my body count from day 1 but simply because she’s aged she now thinks it’s too high.
Now it’s been around 6 months post break up, I’ve seen that she unblocked me on instagram and seen that her following has gone up by 40 (yes, 40!) and a bunch of guys that she followed and liking their pictures (when we were in a relationship, the only pictures that she liked were mine, her close friends and family). I’ve also seen that she is liking a lot of guy’s pictures that she followed in the last year of our relationship that she told me not to worry about.
Was my ex just projecting the whole time?